All Muggleton, Dingley Dellers and much more—Charles Dickens and his connections to cricket - Cricket Country All Muggleton, Dingley Dellers and much more—Charles Dickens and his connections to cricket | Updated : August 18, 2015 10:52 AM IST Some cricket could be found between the Dickensian covers © Getty Images The first tour of English cricketers to Australia, in 1861-62, took place as a replacement show because Charles Dickens had refused to travel that far to give his celebrated readings. But the great writer was connected to the game in many more ways. Arunabha Sengupta sketches the various links between the noble game and the most popular novelist in English language. The cricketing Dickens The day had been spent working with characteristic feverish zeal on the final novel — one that would remain forever unfinished. The Mystery of Edwin Drood lived up to its name, soon slated to remain an eternal mystery. The most popular novelist of England suffered a stroke in the evening. On the following day, June 9, 1870, he was dead at his residence in Gad’s Hill Place.

On the same day, 22-year-old WG Grace opened the innings of United South of England Eleven at London Road, Sleaford, against the 22 men of Sleaford, and scored 115. His opening partner was his brother GF Grace, who scored 100 and helped put on 166 for the first wicket. Also Read Perhaps it was the cricket god’s manner of paying tribute to the great writer who, as can be expected of a novelist in that era, was linked to cricket in a great number of ways. Cricket did crop up in his work many a times. In Pickwick Papers Alfred Jingle claims to have played the game in West Indies. When Mr Pickwick asks him about playing cricket in heat, he rattles off, “’Warm!—red hot—scorching—glowing.

Played a match once—single wicket—friend the colonel—Sir Thomas Blazo—who should get the greatest number of runs.—Won the toss—first innings—seven o’clock A.m.—six natives to look out—went in; kept in—heat intense—natives all fainted—taken away—fresh half-dozen ordered—fainted also—Blazo bowling—supported by two natives—couldn’t bowl me out—fainted too—cleared away the colonel—wouldn’t give in—faithful attendant—Quanko Samba—last man left—sun so hot, bat in blisters, ball scorched brown—five hundred and seventy runs—rather exhausted—Quanko mustered up last remaining strength—bowled me out—had a bath, and went out to dinner.” Sketch by Arunabha Sengupta The conversation takes place beside a ground where a grand match was being played between All-Muggletonians and Dingley Dellers.

Through the game Mr Jingle provides a running commentary, proving himself a “most excellent and undeniable judge of the whole art and mystery of the noble game of cricket.” This match was supposed to have been based on a real fixture between the clubs Cobham and Town Malling, played sometime between 1830 and 1835. However, many critics were actually unkind to the depiction of the match by Dickens, pointing out the apparent ignorance of the game. Bernard Darwin, a most confirmed Dickensian, once refused to include the match in a sporting anthology stating, “John Nyren might have turned in his grave if the writings of one so ignorant of his beloved game had been found next door to his own.” EV Lucas was no more sympathetic, claiming, “The odd things that happened when All-Muggleton met Dingley Dell convince me that the Inimitable, much as he knew of everything else, was not even a theoretical cricketer.” And while Horace Hutchinson was almost rude in his criticism, even the kind-hearted RC Robertson-Glasgow did not have too many favourable things to say, “I don’t know if Dickens ever watched cricket at Lord’s.

Judging solely from his description of the cricket match in the Pickwick Papers, I should doubt it.” One should point out that the novel, at least during the first few chapters that included the cricket match, was meant to be a farce. There is the possibility that Dickens wanted to portray the game in a sufficiently ridiculous manner to suit the tone. Irving Rosenwater, the scrupulous researcher as opposed to those proclaimers of opinion, does reason that Dickens was able to indulge in farce to such effect because he did understand the game. According to him, by chapter VII it was easy to see that Pickwick was designed as a series of farcical cockney sporting adventures. To support his claim, Rosenwater quotes a little brochure titled Sunday Under Three Heads, penned by Dickens in 1836 under the pseudonym Timothy Sparks. In this rather lesser known of his passages, he speaks out eloquently against the call for rigid enforcement of the Sunday Observance Law, voicing that there could be no moral objection to a game of cricket after church. Indeed, Dickens wrote with verve and feeling about a local clergyman himself arranging a game by paying for the stumps, bat and ball.

He raised questions about the rationale of staying at home on a Sunday when men were ready to walk two or three miles to share a good game of cricket. To write such an article in the days when one could still be prosecuted for indulging in cricket on a Sunday spoke of his love for the game, if not quite of his understanding of its nuances. There is no doubt that Dickens saw a lot of cricket, although not necessarily of the First-Class quality. His habit of walking indefatigably was almost as legendary as his writings, and during the course of his saunters he did chance upon quite a few games in progress in London and Kent. Cricket between the Dickensian covers After Pickwick Papers, Dickens did not quite delve into the intricacies of the game in his works. Cricket popped up in his works only once in a while. Cricket on the Hearth unfortunately refers to the insect in its title. Yet, given the enormous volume of his complete works, we do come across quite a few references. Barnaby Rudge is described thinking within himself that the smell of the trodden grass brought back his old days at cricket when he was a young boy and played on Chigwell Green.

In Bleak House the readers are taken to a meadow by the cheerful town where cricket players are assembling in bright groups. James Steerforth, the charismatic friend of David Copperfield, later the seducer of Emily, is described as “the best cricketer you ever saw”. Later David recollects many a summer hour he had known to be but blissful minutes to Mr Dick in the cricket field. We shed a tear when we read about the death of a child with a bat leaning against his bed in The Old Curiosity Shop. And then we ponder about senility when in the Christmas Story The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, the old man of 87 rambles something about a game of cricket and a friend of his which he does not quite remember. There are also some splendid imageries which take the help of cricket. In Little Dorrit Edmund Sparkler, ‘stimulated by Love to brilliancy’, responds to Mr Dorrit saying that for a particular walk a man ought to have a particular pair of shoes, as, for example, shooting, shooting shoes; cricket, cricket-shoes.

Later, in the same novel, Ferdinand explains the ropes to Clennam: “Look at it from the right point of view, and there you have us … It’s like a limited game of cricket. A field of outsiders are always going in to bowl at the Public Service, and we block the balls.” In Martin Chuzzlewit we come across the offices of the ‘Anglo Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company’ where there are green ledgers with red backs, like strong cricket balls beaten flat. The novel also describes, “Yoho, beside the village green, where cricket players linger yet, and every little indentation made in the fresh grass by bat or wicket, ball or player’s foot, sheds out its perfume on the night.” And in Sketches by Boz there is Edward Twigger of Mudfog, ragged, roaring and roving kind of fellow, who would work away at a cricket-match by the day together, running, catching, and batting and bowling, and revelling in toil which would exhaust a galley slave.

Little Nell too comes across a game of cricket on the green with boys and men playing and other folks looking on, while in the Uncommercial Traveller the small boys of Boles’s take on the small boys of Coles’s in a cricket match. But it is in The Lazy Tour of Two Apprentices, co-written with Wilkie Collins, that we are offered a rather sumptuous cricketing feast. Thomas Idle accompanies a party of friends to the cricket field as a spectator, but has to enter the fray because there was one man short in one of the playing teams. He is horrified to find his friend, “on ordinary occasions the meekest and mildest of human beings, suddenly contract his eye-brows, compress his lips, assume the aspect of an infuriated savage, run back a few steps and then run forward, and without the slightest previous provocation, hurl a detestably hard ball with all his might straight at Thomas’s legs.

Stimulated to preternatural activity of bod and sharpness of eye by the instinct of self-preservation, Mr Idle contrived, by jumping deftly aside at the right moment, and by using his bat (ridiculously narrow as it was for the purpose) as a shield to preserve his life and limbs from the dastardly attack that had been made on both, to leave the full force of the deadly missile to strike his wicket instead of his leg.” While fielding he follows the same sound principles of absolute self-preservation. “Impervious to ridicule and abuse … whenever the ball came near him, he thought of his shins and got out of the way immediately. Catch it, Stop it, Pitch it up were cries that passed by him like the idle wind that he regarded not. He ducked under it, he jumped over it, he whisked himself away from it on either side. Never once through the whole innings did he and the ball come together on anything approaching intimate terms.” This side-splitting description of cricket, though, is generally attributed to Collins. However, there is no denying that Dickens did like cricket.

Even when he was in Italy, while writing The Schoolboy’s Story he created a hero, Old Cheeseman, who walks one night in his sleep with a fishing rod and a cricket bat in his grasp, and later on stops his carriage at the cricket field and takes a long look, with his wife, at the boys of his old school playing the game. The name ‘Pickwick’ has been adopted by cricket clubs from Birmingham to Barbados. Even a Twenty20 championship, played in distant cricket-agnostic Switzerland, is called the PickwickT20. The connection of Dickens with cricket does not end there. As a journalist he covered the social life of London and often turned vocal about the lot of the poor. He criticised the high gate fees charged at Lord’s saying, “The London masses do not care much for cricket, probably because they have little chance of exercising any taste they may have for the noble game; but if they did, the half-crown gate-money would effectively keep them out.” The first tour of an English team to Australia also took place because of the indirect influence of Dickens. Felix William Spiers and Christopher Pond were the partners of ‘Spiers and Pond’ — a company that ran Café de Paris in Melbourne.

The entrepreneurs tried to interest the author to visit Australia and conduct a few lectures. They say travel is invaluable to writers, but the great English novelist was not interested in the long journey. He was already hugely successful and was riding on the crest of fame at that time, having recently turned the French Revolution into the backdrop of a novel with A Tale of Two Cities. Hence, as a replacement feature, a team of English cricketers captained by HH Stephenson of Surrey sailed from Liverpool on The Great Britain and docked in Melbourne on October 20, 1861. Thus first England team to Australia arrived and was greeted by a crowd described by the Melbourne Herald as not seen since “the Athenians arrived in Corinth.” Scoring by Boz and A Tale of Two Paintings In the Memorial gallery at the Lord’s cricket ground, we come across a famous oil painting, formerly the property of Sir Jeremiah Colman. In it Dickens is depicted bowling the first ball in a charity match, in the meadow behind his final home at Gad’s Hil Place, near Rochester. While the cricketers are in white, Dickens, like the umpires, is dressed in black and is in the process of sending down an underhand delivery.

It is dated September 16, 1868, roughly two years before the death of the writer. The overarm delivery was allowed from 1864, but there were still plenty of exponents of the underarm version in 1868. The fielding side is shown raising their handkerchiefs in synchronised cheer. In February 1932, the auctioning house Sotheby’s received a letter from Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, son of the immortal novelist: “The picture is one representing Gad’s Hill, of that there cannot be the slightest doubt; and the incident shown in the picture is one which may most probably have happened. My father lived in Gad’s Hill from 1856 to 1870 … from my own knowledge cricket matches were constantly played on this field. Indeed, towards the end of the time we had a village cricket club of which I was the captain. I cannot recall the ‘Charity Match’ which it represents but it may have taken place when I was away at school or college.

My father used to take the part of ‘scorer’ at the games we played there, and was sustained in that arduous job by the ‘cooling drinks’ provided for the guests who were staying in the house at the time or for the neighbours who came to see the games. Having regard to his interest in cricket itself and his keen interest in promoting the cause of charity, I can, I think, safely say that the incident did happen.” However, Neil Robinson, Library and Research Manager at Lord’s, informed this writer that a more recent evaluation of the painting in question has revealed that the scene of cricket was a later addition onto the original scenery of the meadow behind Dickens’s last home. Hence, while the match depicted could have been real or fictional, the painting is certainly a compound of the real and the imaginary. Yet, we do have enough evidence to believe that Dickens was likely to have been a regular figure at the matches played at Gad’s Hill. In late 1867, the novelist was touring USA, when he sent a letter to his son Henry—much of it a lengthy discourse on the quality of cricket in Kent.

A while later, in early 1868, he wrote to his son from Baltimore he discusses the ways of administering the Higham Cricket Club, urging young Henry to assume the role of the captain. Sizeable crowds turned up to watch the cricket matches at Gad’s Hill, and Dickens arranged for William Stocker Trood, the landlord of the Sir John Falstaff Inn, to have a drinking-booth on the ground. Later he held Christmas sports at the venue, in which he himself was judge and referee, and confessed that the arrangement was prompted by the success of the summer cricket matches. The great writer was also known to invite eminent men of the locality to lunch with him when cricket matches took place at the ground. George Dolby, who managed Dickens’s immensely successful reading tours, commented, “Mr Dickens was a great lover of cricket, and in the summer of 1866 he would often hurry back to Gad’s Hill after a visit to town, in order to be present at a cricket match in the field at the back of his house — between his own Higham Club and some other club in the neighbourhood.” According to several eyewitnesses of these matches, Dickens did act as the scorer on numerous occasions.

Percy Fitzgerald, a renowned student of Dickensiana, wrote, “I myself have seen him sit the whole day in a marquee, during a match … marking in the most admirable manner.” There happens to be another oil painting, rather less well-known, titled ‘Henry Dickens’s XI v Men of Kent 1860’ where Dickens can be seen scoring at a small table on the boundary alongside a fellow scorer. This painting also belonged to Sir Jeremiah Coleman. However, it shows the match being played on the land in front of Falstaff Inn and in Dickens’s time there was no such cricket ground. Besides, Henry Dickens was only 11 in 1860 and would not have been expected to be the skipper in such an important game. It is quite likely that the artist, J Shaw, took some liberties. Yet, this painting, the one depicting Dickens the bowler, and another one showing Benjamin Disraeli at the wicket, hung in Dickens’s house until his death. Rosenwater, however, is not satisfied with merely proving Dickens’s love for the game, and goes on trying to furnish further proof of his knowledge and judgement of cricket.

He writes, “When batting for Kent Colts as a 17-year-old George Henry Remnant came under Dickens’s notice at Gravesend in 1866. Very soon afterwards, Dickens wrote to him asking him to play for the home team at Gad’s Hill. At the first match in which Remnant took part (in 1866) he scored 78, which won the match for his side — to Dickens’s particular delight in his own selection of the young player. Dickens personally congratulated Remnant, who played many times thereafter at Gad’s Hill.” There is another enchanting story of this Remnant. Once when batting at Gad’s Hill, he drove a ball hard and it travelled quite some distance. Ultimately, it landed on the back of a pony harnessed to the small carriage in which the Dickens children’s governess was sitting. The piny was shocked and bolted. Remnant, throwing down his bat, ‘gave chase and caught the pony before any damage was done.’ Ellen Ternan, the Rochester born actress who went on to become Dickens’s mistress for more than a decade, also supposedly played the game and had an understanding of it vastly superior to that of the novelist.

Yet, as Rosenwater concludes: “Dickens’s knowledge of cricket may not have been as extensive and peculiar as Mr Weller’s of London, but it was sufficient to afford him much pleasure and conviviality — which after all are the basic qualities we associate with both Dickens and the game of cricket.” ( Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces.

The author of four novels, he can be followed on Twitter at ) First Published on August 18, 2015 7:00 AM IST Last updated on August 18, 2015 10:52 AM IST TOPICS: 20 Jan, 2017 21:00 IST Dubai International Cricket Stadium, Dubai 20 Jan, 2017 21:30 IST SuperSport Park, Centurion 22 Jan, 2017 08:50 IST | 03:20 GMT Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG), Sydney 22 Jan, 2017 13:30 IST | 08:00 GMT Eden Gardens, Kolkata 22 Jan, 2017 18:00 IST | 12:30 GMT The Wanderers Stadium, Johannesburg 25 Jan, 2017 21:30 IST | 16:00 GMT Newlands, Cape Town 26 Jan, 2017 08:50 IST | 03:20 GMT Adelaide Oval,

 Adelaide Ashley Mallett on the 1868 Aboriginal tour of England | Cricket | ESPN Cricinfo How the first England team to tour Australia might not have, if it were not for a refusal by the great novelist 6 The pioneering 1868 Aboriginal side to England © The Cricketer International In the Australian summer of 1861-62, Charles Dickens dismissed a handsome offer of £7000 to embark on a reading tour Down Under; HH Stephenson's England cricket team toured Australia instead.

Dickens was then offered £10,000 to visit Australia in the summer of 1862-63, and the offer was increased substantially over a number of weeks but the great novelist rejected them all. He was destined never to set foot in Australia. The £7000 offer was made by Melbourne entrepreneurs Felix Spiers , who kept the Royal Hotel and Café de Paris in Bourke Street, and Christopher Pond, the host of the Piazza Hotel on the corner of Bourke and King Streets. The two men pooled resources to either get Dickens Down Under or bring out the first England cricket team. They enlisted the services of an agent, Richard Mallam, who sounded Dickens out, but though the writer had toyed with the idea of settling in Australia, he did not commit to the move because he could "only not do so until he should have finished Little Dorrit", as John Forster's biography had it. A key member of the England team that visited was Charles Lawrence , an allrounder, who as a boy in 1840 walked the 22km from Merton in Surrey to Lord's to watch his heroes, among them Fuller Pilch, the All England champion bat.

Round that time, Dickens was in Ballechelish, Scotland, polishing his newest epic, Barnaby Rudge. The cricket connection was never far away with Dickens. In The Pickwick Papers he wrote with charm about a cricketing encounter between the fictional All Muggleton and Dingley Dell. Dickens makes light of the game but shows his eye for detail: "[Each Fieldsman] fixed himself into proper attitude by placing one hand on each knee, and stooping very much as if he were 'making a back' for some beginner at leap-frog. All the regular players do this sort of thing - indeed it's generally supposed that it is quite impossible to look out properly in any other direction. 'Play', suddenly cried the bowler. The ball flew from his hand straight and swift towards the centre stump of the wicket. The wary Dumpkins was on the alert; it fell upon the tip of the bat and bounded far away over the heads of the scouts, who had just stooped low enough to let it fly over them." Lawrence stayed in Australia to coach cricket, and he eventually found himself captain-coach of the Australian Aboriginal cricket team that toured England in 1868 .

On that tour the Aboriginal team played 47 two-day games, of which they won 14, lost 14, and had the better of the home sides in most of the drawn matches. The players were given pseudonyms or nicknames because their tribal names were either too hard to spell or pronounce, or both. Johnny Mullagh (Unaarrimin) was a specialist batsman and good medium-fast bowler, who played 45 matches on that tour, scoring 1698 runs at 23.65 and taking 245 wickets at 10 runs apiece. Lawrence, who in 1849 took all ten wickets against William Clarke's famous All England Xl in Edinburgh, hit 1156 runs at 20.16 and took 250 wickets at 12. But there was a huge difference in abilities among the players.

For instance, one man, Sundown (Ballrinjarrimin), a specialist batsman, scored just one run on tour in three completed innings - though it was a personal best, because no one ever knew Sundown to have scored a single run in any match prior to the England tour, and he never played after 1868. While Lawrence was in London with the Aboriginal team, he met Spiers and Pond, the men who had payrolled the England tour to Australia six years previously. Lawrence learnt that the two entrepreneurs did not collect the publicised £11,000 profit from the tour: as they ordered more wine to share with Lawrence in their Covent Garden restaurant, they confessed that their take was actually a cool £19,000, which left them flush with funds - more than enough to tempt Dickens for a reading tour with, the following year, 1862-63.

A great athlete, Dick-a-Dick would arm himself with a parrying shield and a leangle (killer boomerang), and for the price of one shilling would challenge all and sundry to throw a cricket ball at him from a distance of ten paces When the big offer came, in the English summer of 1862, Dickens was said to have uttered: "A Man from Australia is in London, ready to pay £10,000 for eight months there. If…" It was an "if" that troubled him for some time, and led to agitating discussion. The civil war having closed the Americas, the increase made upon the last offer was tempting. He tried to familiarise himself with the fancy that he should thus get new material for observation, and he went so far as to plan An Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down. In the end, though, he decided against it. "[T]hese renewed and larger offers tempt me.

I can force myself to go aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading desk what I have a hundred times, but whether, with all this unsettled fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of it is another question." On the 1868 Aboriginal tour there was a man who had hand-eye co-ordination like no other, possibly to rank with the young Don Bradman, who famously taught himself to hit a golf ball with a stump as it rebounded off the family backyard tank-stand. Dickens would have loved Dick-a-Dick (Jumgumjenanuke), for he was the veritable Artful Dodger of the team. Dickens loved the game and had a cricket pitch in his expansive backyard at Gadshill. He may well also have seen the Aboriginal team pass his house in a coach as they travelled from Gravesend, taking the main road to Strood on their way to West Malling.

A great athlete, Dick-a-Dick would arm himself with a parrying shield and a leangle (killer boomerang), and for the price of one shilling would challenge all and sundry to throw a cricket ball at him from a distance of ten paces. If a challenger got a ball past Dick-a-Dick and struck him anywhere on his body, the ball thrower would be paid ten shillings. At The Oval in May 1868, seven men threw in unison at one point, but not one ball found its mark. The balls aimed at his head and chest he easily parried with his shield, and those thrown below the waist were deflected by skilful use of the leangle. Before and after play and during intervals in every game, Dick-a-Dick was on the challenge. At Lord's in June 1868, he persuaded ten gentlemen to shed their top hats to throw at him at once, and evaded them all. Just once on the entire tour was this remarkable athlete caught off guard - in Derby, by a man named Samuel Richardson , in September of 1868.

Lawrence's tour was a great success, although one man, King Cole (Brippokei), died tragically after a short and sudden illness. King Cole had a cold but it wasn't considered sufficiently bad for him to miss the much-awaited game at Lord's, which ended on June 13. King Cole died of pneumonia ten days later, at Guy's Hospital in London. The Australian team management was fearful of more deaths on tour, so in September, one month ahead of the expected departure of the team for Australia, two players - Sundown and Jim Crow (Jallachmurrimin) - who had developed bad colds were sent home. In those days a heavy chest cold was something to fear, for if pneumonia developed, as indeed it had with King Cole, the condition invariably proved fatal. Charles Dickens was indirectly responsible for the first England team touring Australia © Getty Images In the wake of the Aboriginal team, the first "official" Australian team toured England in 1878 , under the leadership of Dave Gregory.

In the very first Test match , played in March 1877 at the MCG, Australia had beaten England by 45 runs, but the home side did not grant Gregory's men a Test in England in 1878. The first Test on English soil was in 1880, at The Oval , where England, led by Lord Harris and dominated by WG Grace's 152, beat Australia by five wickets. Then came the extraordinary Test of 1882 , at The Oval. Australia won by seven runs, thanks to the brilliant bowling of Fred Spofforth, who took 7 for 46 and 7 for 44 to demolish the home side, following which the Sporting Times carried a mock obituary , stating that the body of English cricket would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. There is a link, if tenuous, between the 1868 Aboriginal team and the Ashes legend. Nine years after he destroyed the cream of English batting, Spofforth played as an import for Derby. Samuel Richardson, the man who got one past Dick-a-Dick's guard in 1868, was the secretary of the club then.

Spofforth happened to catch Richardson with his hand in the till - to no great avail, as Richardson pocketed £1000 and fled to Spain, where he became the court tailor to King Alfonso and lived to the ripe old age of 93. I am not sure what the moral of this story is, but Dick-a-Dick's killer boomerang now stands behind glass in the Lord's Museum, less than three paces from the Ashes urn. There is a good deal of other 1868 team memorabilia as well, including two scorecards. The players wore coloured sashes to help identify them on the scorecard. Today players have numbers on their backs, but the Aboriginals' coloured clothing beat Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket in that area by 109 years. The 1868 Australians were the trailblazers, the men who followed on from Stephenson's 1861-62 team, which toured Down Under because Charles Dickens dismissed the lure of a reading tour. The first Test was played less than nine years after the Aboriginal team toured England.

If Dickens had not let a juicy offering fly past harmlessly, Test cricket would probably have taken longer to come to pass. In 2002, thanks to continued lobbying by Ian Chappell, the 1868 Aboriginal cricket team was inducted into Australian cricket's Hall of Fame. In 2001 I took an Under-21 Aboriginal cricket team on a short tour of England. It was a part re-enactment of the 1868 tour, and we got to play at Lord's and see Dickens' fictional cricket match between Muggleton and Dingley Dell illustrated on the back of the £10 note then. We even had a ceremony at King Cole's graveside at Meath Gardens in London. During the ceremony, ochre was sprinkled on the grave - the mother (ochre representing the mother, the land) brought to the son. As coach of the team I was asked to read the words uttered by Lawrence when King Cole was buried all those years ago. The racist White Australia policy weighed heavily against indigenous people Down Under, and it almost certainly prevented Aboriginal cricketers playing Test cricket. After the 1868 tour, Aboriginal cricket fell away.

A few, such as Jack Marsh of New South Wales, who the England player and later administrator Pelham Warner said in 1903 was the best bowler in the world, was hounded out of cricket with the allegation that he chucked. So too Eddie Gilbert , the only bowler to have knocked the bat from Don Bradman's grasp, was said to have thrown. Jason Gillespie is the first acknowledged male Aboriginal Test cricketer, but how many others wore the baggy green before him - men who knew that if they revealed their true background they would never have played top cricket? Bibliography Charles Lawrence's journal (written in 1911) Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster Ashley Mallett took 132 Tests wickets in 38 Tests for Australia. He is the author of over 25 books, including Lords Dreaming, the story of the 1868 Aboriginal tour of England. © ESPN Sports Media Ltd. Top 10 cricket scenes in fiction | Books | The Guardian Top 10s Top 10 cricket scenes in fiction From Wodehouse and Douglas Adams to Dickens and even Joyce, the game has been pitched into some first-class novels Spinning stories ...

India’s Stuart Binny plays a shot during the final 2015 test match against Sri Lanka. Photograph: Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters Richard Tomlinson Share on Messenger Close In his autobiography, Arthur Conan Doyle recalled how he was once stumped by the England wicketkeeper Dick Lilley off the bowling of WG Grace. Sherlock Holmes would have instantly spotted Conan Doyle’s creative embellishment. A check of the scorecard (London County CC v MCC, July 1902) shows that while the bowler was Grace, the keeper was not Lilley but Edward French, an obscure amateur. Fiction has a tendency to creep into cricket anecdotes, as I discovered during research for my biography of Grace. Yet that does not mean cricket is easy terrain for novelists. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, an otherwise perfect thriller, the only false note is struck when Smiley says Control “hated everywhere except Surrey, the Circus and Lord’s Cricket Ground”. It is of course just “Lord’s”. Few writers know enough about cricket to avoid such pitfalls and have the literary skill to make the game connect with life beyond the boundary.

Here are 10 authors who have pulled off this double achievement, as difficult as a cricketer’s “double” (1,000 runs and 100 wickets in a season). 1. The Go-Between by LP Hartley (1953) Twelve year-old Leo Colston becomes embroiled in a heady adult world of sex, lies and handwritten notes during a hot summer holiday spent at a posh schoolfriend’s stately home in Norfolk. Leo runs messages for his friend’s elder sister Marian and her secret lover Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer, while Viscount Trimingham steels himself to propose to her. Hartley distils Leo’s emotional confusion into one climactic moment of betrayal at the annual cricket match between Brandham Hall and the local village team, when he catches Burgess, the village’s star batsman, off the bowling of Trimingham. Brandham Hall wins the game. In different ways, Burgess, Marian and Leo are poised to lose everything. 2. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (2008) Hans van den Brock, a Wall Street bank analyst, seeks solace from a broken marriage by joining Staten Island cricket club.

One sweltering afternoon, a Trinidadian umpire called Chuck Ramkissoon orders a bowler out of the attack for delivering dangerous bouncers. The fielders protest and then scatter when a man wanders onto the field brandishing a gun. Ramkissoon stays put and persuades the intruder to leave the field. We already know that the umpire will die a gangster’s death, his handcuffed body dumped in a canal. Why then, does he deliver a homily after the game about cricket as a lesson in civility? In one passage of play (or rather, non-play), O’Neill sets up a sub-plot that deserves a novel in itself. Top 10 conservative novels 3. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon (1928) In his autobiographical novel, Sassoon uses an Edwardian village cricket game between Batley and Rotherden to evoke a rural English society that was buried in the mud and slaughter of the first world war. Young George Sherston (the fictionalised Sassoon) excitedly whitens his pads with “Blanco” after learning he has been picked for Batley.

Pastor Yalden, a cricket-mad cleric, is bowled by a “vicious yorker”. A nervous waiting batsman fumbles with straps and buckles as he hears the wickets crash. As a piece of nostalgia, the “Flower Show match” is pitch perfect – not least because we are aware that time will soon be called on this idyll. Sherston ends the book in the trenches, having “more or less made up my mind to die”. 4. Playing the Game by Ian Buruma (1991) This beguiling novel by a half-Dutch cricket fan about the Indian batting genius KS Ranjitsinhji (1872-1933) is also an exploration of cultural ambivalence. A thinly fictionalised Buruma arrives at Ranji’s alma mater in Gujarat to find an old boys’ cricket match in progress. It is anyone’s guess where England ends and India begins. The OBs wear blazers and old school ties and call out “Good Shot!” in English, Gujarati and Hindi. Afterwards, the English headmaster (Tonbridge and Balliol) invites Buruma to tea.

Here is an England that “only ever existed in India, as a piece of Raj theatre”. 5. Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams (1982) “Although it has been said that on Earth alone in our Galaxy is Krikkit (or cricket) treated as fit subject for a game, and that for this reason the Earth has been shunned, this only does apply to our Galaxy, and more specifically to our dimension.” So begins Douglas Adams’s intergalactic comic riff on the meaning of Krikkit (“Let’s be blunt, it’s a nasty game”). UFOs appear above Lord’s as time traveller Arthur Dent prepares to bowl at a Krikkit robot. It’s cricket, Jim, but not as we know it. 6. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (1836-37) Dickens’s match between Muggleton and Dingley Dell remains one of the best satires on how cricket appears to the uninitiated.

After Mr Tupman is accidentally shot in the arm, Mr Pickwick declares he is keen to watch a game “in which the impotent effects of unskilful people do not endanger human life” – precisely the danger faced by early 19th-century batsmen on unprepared pitches. Nobody gets killed during Muggleton v Dingley Dell, but the game is so tedious you could easily die of boredom. In the end, Dingley Dell simply give up when they recognise Muggleton’s “superior prowess”. It is all rather pointless, which is probably Dickens’s point. 7. Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn (2011) Cricket is rarely seen through a woman’s eyes in fiction, except to illustrate their ignorance of the game. Twenty-one year-old Connie Callaway, a keen cricket fan, breaks the chauvinist mould in Anthony Quinn’s fine novel about love, war and “the discipline of batsmanship”. At a county match in 1911, Connie offers some advice to out-of-form Will Maitland about his batting technique.

“May I ask, Miss Callaway,” Will bristles, “have you ever played cricket yourself?” Connie walks off in a huff, appalled by Will’s pomposity, even though “she had rather liked his face”. Romance is just around the corner, fielding at leg slip. 8. Psmith in the City by PG Wodehouse (1910) Local bigwig John Bickersdyke walks in front of the sightscreen, distracting the batsman Mike Jackson, who is on 98. Jackson misses the ball and is bowled, and his team lose the match. Only cricket fans can appreciate the full horror of Bickersdyke’s faux pas; yet like an American cocktail or a fully buttoned waistcoat, something has evidently disturbed the Wodehousian world order. After such a blunder, is Bickersdyke after all the right kind of chap to take Mike’s friend Psmith under his wing? You already sense the answer. 9.

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers (1933) Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic detective, goes undercover as Death Bredon, an advertising copywriter, to unmask a murderer at Pym’s Publicity Ltd. Batting in a company cricket match, Wimsey can’t resist hitting a wild fast bowler all around the ground after he is struck a nasty blow on the elbow. An elderly spectator recognises “Bredon” as the same Wimsey who scored 112 for Oxford at Lord’s in 1911. Fortunately, a brilliant run-out by one of his teammates has already given Lord Peter his vital final clue. Terrific stuff. Who cares that Sayers’s plot is pure tosh? 10. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939) Only Joyce could have constructed a filthy sex scene out of the names of first-class cricketers.

Here’s a taster: “… whenever she druv gehind her stumps for a tyddlesly wink through his tunnil-clefft bagslops after the rising bounder’s yorkers, as he studd and stoddard and trutted and trumpered, to see had lordherry’s blackham’s red bobby abbel …” JT Tyldesley, J Tunnicliffe, CT Studd, AE Stoddart, AE Trott, VV Trumper, Lord Harris, JM Blackham and R Abel never had it so good. After a page in this vein (and yes, Grace gets a piece of the action) you wonder how Joyce’s weak eyes coped with poring over old editions of Wisden. Fortunately help was on hand in the form of the former first-class batsman S Beckett, Joyce’s research assistant on Finnegans Wake. Richard Tomlinson’s centenary biography, Amazing Grace: The Man who was WG, is published by Little, Brown, priced £25. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop for £20 .

Mr Pickwick: My favourite Charles Dickens character - Telegraph Charles Dickens Mr Pickwick: My favourite Charles Dickens character Mr Pickwick - from The Pickwick Papers - is part Falstaff, part Bertie Wooster says Sameer Rahim. He is the eighteenth in the Telegraph pick of the best Charles Dickens characters. Image 1 of 3 Mr Pickwick Addresses the Club - an illustration by Robert Seymour for the Pickwick Paper by Charles Dickens. The Penguin Classic paperback edition of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. By Sameer Rahim , Assistant Books Editor 7:00AM GMT 16 Feb 2012 Follow My Favourite Charles Dickens character: Mr Pickwick from The Pickwick Papers (1836) “There are very few moments in a man’s existence, when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.” Yet there are few of Dickens’s characters to whom we feel as charitable as we do towards Mr Pickwick – especially near the start of The Pickwick Papers, when his hat flies away as “merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide”.

“I thought of Mr Pickwick, and wrote the first number,” said Dickens. Part Falstaff, part Bertie Wooster, Mr Pickwick embodies the conviviality, lively appetite and good humour that is an enduring part of an Englishman’s self-image. When the rotund, bespectacled gentleman first appeared in 1836 the public immediately fell in love with him, and his creator. Even now you find Pickwick clubs and Pickwick pubs all over England; and the old Dickens £10 note was not illustrated by something from Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol but with The Pickwick Papers’s cricket match between Dingley Dell and All Muggleton. (Then again you wouldn’t have wanted Fagin or Scrooge anywhere near your cash.) His adventures turn slightly sour when one Mrs Bardell sues him for reneging on his offer of marriage. Needless to say, Mr Pickwick had no idea he had made such a promise, but he still ends up in debtors’ prison.

When a deranged man steals his nightcap, he defends himself and then, in Dickens’s words, “communicated a revolving motion to his clenched fists, by way of appalling his antagonists with a display of science.” So ludicrous does he appear that his opponent bursts into laughter. Dickens’s advice to anyone who loses his hat could be the motto for Mr Pickwick and, indeed, for us all: while others laugh, keep “smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else”. Related Articles ESPNcricinfo XI: Players who share names with famous people | Cricket | ESPN Cricinfo You'd do a double take on seeing these names on a scorecard 41 Julius Caesar Only about 1900 years after the Roman invasion, Julius Caesar from Godalming had a long career as a batsman. He made three centuries for Surrey, the highest of them 132 not out against Sussex in Hove in 1864.

This Caesar, like his namesake, came to something of a sticky end: aged 47 in 1878, and possibly depressed that his cricket career had drawn to a close, he threw himself under a train near Guildford on March 6 (not quite the Ides, but not far off). William Shakespeare Someone answering to the name of the Bard played for Worcestershire in the 1920s: William Harold Nelson Shakespeare appeared in 26 county games soon after the First World War, making his two highest scores - 62 and 67 not out - against Warwickshire in 1919 (sadly, at Edgbaston rather than Stratford-upon-Avon). He was a Wing Commander in the RAF, and later became Worcestershire's president. Charles Dickens The 19th-century novelist had a couple of cricket connections.

A scene derived from his book The Pickwick Papers, of a cricket match between Dingley Dell and All Muggleton, featured on the back of the British ten-pound note for years, and he also played an unwitting part in the birth of international cricket: he was asked by the catering company Spiers and Pond to undertake a lecture tour of Australia in the winter of 1861, and when he turned them down they changed tack and invited an English cricket team to undertake the first tour down under instead. But a Charles Dickens did play first-class cricket - in four matches for the South African province Griqualand West just after the Second World War. When he played against Orange Free State he was dismissed by Keats. Thomas More Nearly 350 years after Henry VIII's former Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More was burned at the stake, Thomas Jasper Mytton More was born in Shropshire, for whom he kept wicket in Minor County cricket. An Old Etonian, he also played for MCC. George Bernard Shaw Someone whose parents presumably had a sense of humour, left-arm spinner George Bernard Shaw played 16 matches for Glamorgan between 1951 and 1955.

He took 10 wickets against the Combined Services in a first-class match at Cardiff Arms (and the Man?) Park in 1952. Jeeves Percy Jeeves was a Yorkshire-born allrounder who came close to achieving the double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in his first full season for Warwickshire, in 1913. Although his form fell away a little the following year he was highly thought of - but sadly he was killed in action in France two years later, aged only 28. But his name lives on: when the author PG Wodehouse - a cricket fan himself, who played several times at Lord's for the Authors XI - was casting around for a name for probably his finest comic creation, Bertie Wooster's omnipotent manservant, he lighted upon Jeeves' surname and borrowed it. James Callaghan About the nearest the man who became Britain's prime minister in 1976 came to cricket was when he defeated Ted Dexter - the England captain at the time - to retain his Cardiff seat in the 1964 General Election.

Later, when home secretary, Callaghan advised against the 1970 South African tour of England taking place, and it was almost immediately cancelled. But although Callaghan the politician died in 2005, Callaghan the cricketer put in a recent appearance: Cameroon's team for their World Cricket League Division 3 match against the Gambia in Accra (Ghana) in February 2011 featured one Wamba James Callaghan. Brian Aldridge A long-serving character in the even-longer-running BBC Radio serial The Archers, Brian Aldridge is played by Charles Collingwood, a keen club cricketer himself. New Zealander Brian Aldridge was a long-serving umpire who stood in 26 Tests and 45 one-day internationals, including the 1992 World Cup final in Melbourne . Robert Kennedy Senator Robert Kennedy (the politician) served as attorney general under his brother, JFK, and was assassinated himself in 1968, while running for president. Robert "Senator" Kennedy (the cricketer) was a fast-medium bowler for Wellington who played four Tests for New Zealand in 1995-96.

Sherlock Holmes A slight cheat here, as no one of this name has ever played first-class cricket - but Holmes' creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did: his only wicket, in 10 first-class games for MCC, was that of WG Grace , who was playing for London County in 1900 (WG was 51 at the time, but had scored 110). But many people believe Holmes' distinctive first name was adapted from the surname of the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire fast bowler Frank Shacklock , while it's even more likely that the name of Holmes' even cleverer brother was borrowed from another Derbyshire bowler, William Mycroft . Alec and Eric Bedser The Surrey twins? That would be rather too easy. But there was another set of Bedser twins, also named Alec and Eric, born in South Africa in 1948 - and remarkably they became good cricketers too. Alec, a medium-pace bowler (naturally), played first-class cricket for Border, but sadly died in a car accident in 1981. Eric, while he didn't quite reach the first-class ranks, was a decent cricketer and a good all-round sportsman.

Steven Lynch is the editor of the Cricinfo Guide to International Cricket 2011 . And Ask Steven is now on Facebook © ESPN Sports Media Ltd. Collecting Cricket Fiction - Articles about rare books, antiquarian books, manuscripts, autographs, first editions, illustrated books, maps,... - ILAB-LILA Christopher Saunders Background Cricket fiction may seem a small subject, but a collection could rapidly and relatively cheaply grow to several hundred items dating from 1820 to 2008. Among the earliest items would be In School and Out of School (1825) which contains a description of the game and an illustration, and Mary Mitford’s Our Village (also published in the 1820’s). A contemporary example (published in 2008) is Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which is based around cricket in New York. Range The range is vast, taking in not just those books where cricket is the main theme—such as Death Before Wicket (Nancy Spain, 1946) and Malleson at Melbourne (William Godfrey, 1956)—but those where cricket or a cricket match has an important place in the story.

This category would include Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1837; Dingley Dell v. All Muggleton), L. P. Hartley’s The Go Between (1953) and Anthony Trollope’s futuristic novel, The Fixed Period (1882), which is set on an island in the South Pacific and features an amazing cricket match with a steam powered bowling cannon. Many school stories contain cricket matches, and there are a huge number of short stories with cricket themes in magazines such as Chums, Boy’s Own Paper, The Captain and Young England. There are also many paperback thrillers dating from the 1920’s and 30’s with such evocative titles as The Schoolboy Test Match Player and Six Hit Sansom’s Chinese Puzzle. An expansive collection would also include religious works such as The Cricket Field of the Christian Life (c1900) and Baxter’s Second Innings (1892), the first edition of which is bound as a pair of pads. Another rich seam is poetry, and there are even operettas such as The Batsman’s Bride (1957).

Availability It would be difficult to find a general bookseller without something to fit into this category—be it a novel with cricket references, a school story, or a children’s annual from the 1930’s with a short story. Price Many items can be found for $10$50 but, at the more expensive end, a first edition of In School and Out of School could cost $1200 and a first edition of Trollope’s The Fixed Period $2500. Footnote Gerald Brodribb produced the first short bibliography of cricket in fiction in 1950. This was superseded by E. M. Padwick’s Bibliography of Cricket (1977), which is considered the definitive work; a second, expanded edition was published in 1984 and a supplement in 1991. However, neither of these can claim to include everything in this category and part of the fun of collecting cricket fiction is finding items which are “Not in Padwick”. The article was first published in the “ANZAAB Aspects of Book Collecting” on , and is presented here, with our thanks, by permission of the ANZAAB.

Published since 23 Feb 2010

Question: Which Dickens novel features a Cricket match between 'All-Muggleton' and 'Dingley Dell'?
Answer: 'THE PICKWICK PAPERS'